A someone who has been "active" in the Drupal community for over 8 years, it is shocking to see that only in the last 3 years Drupal was really picked up by the mainstream press. This is not due to the quality of the code of Drupal of the community, as much as it has to do with building momentum and a shake out in the CMS landscape. So this story about Drupal being in the "Top 10 coolest Open Source products" (yes, it is that time of the year again) comes as no surprise to anyone how knows the code or the community.

The real power of Drupal however is that 5 (!) other Open Source projectsof the top 10 products use Drupal as a platform to deliver their tools, empower their community. That is the real power of Drupal. 6 (including Drupal self) of the top 10 Open Source tools according to CRN.com use Drupal:

1. Ledger SMB (a fork of SQL ledger)
2. DoJo (they hacked Drupal core to get the DoJo in and JQuery out :-) )
3. Ubuntu (Linux for humans, with their famous bug 1)
4. Firefox, the best browser chrome :-) )
5. OO.org, word!

Drupal power. "We, the Drupal community" are proud :-)

Dear friend Pat Patterson (twitter) pinged me the other day to let me know he actually wrote a module for Drupal. If you do not know Pat, he is the leading authority when it comes to all things "Identity Management"; process, vision and actual code in Sun's OpenSSO project (Sun's open version of the previous proprietary Sun Access Manager. And now Pat released OpenSSO module for Drupal.

Identity management is complex, it is more then 1 slide per second or a technical solution. The biggest problem in ID management is trust, procedures as well as installed base. Migrating a corporation with thousands of employees that is fully AD based (like most enterprises are) towards something like OpenID is impossible. And OpenID by itself only solves parts of the AAA problem. Where OpenSSo might for a corporation migrating towards a more open way of dealing with identities ("persons") a far more better way.

Logging in to a website with Single Sign On (or more often: Single Log On) is only a small part of the problem of an enterprise. Sure, an increasing part since more and more applications are webbased; AJAX replaced RDP and ICA for many tasks. But still, only a small part. So if one wants to push Drupal into the heart of an enterprise as an Intra- or extranet, one needs to understand that OpenID / OAUTH might be good for an all webbased company, but not for any company that is older then 10 years.

OpenSSO however is. And Pat's work to integrate this into Drupal sure helps. Thanks Pat!

We are very pleased with SUN Microsystems becoming a Gold sponsor for the DrupalCon as well. By donating 3000 Euro's SUN shows its alignment with Open Source and Drupal. A list of all sponsors is online, we appreciate all of our sponsors and you one as well, 150 Euro's gets your logo listed and free entrance!

This is a very sad day. Kathy of the famous Creating passionate users influenced a lot of people, both inside the Java community as well as outside that scope. I know she influenced Dries and hence Drupal as well as many other people and communities. She does a great job an explaining how to "set up" (read: facilitate) communities of passionate users and is the leader in this field.

Now however she is afraid and sad.

I have cancelled all speaking engagements.
I am afraid to leave my yard.
I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.

And the fact that anyone on the internet is afraid should make us all sad. Independent of race or gender, people are stalked on the net since the bad guy (m/f) think nobody knows what a dog you are on the internet.

I hope Kathy gets well soon and people who damage her wellbeing will get what they deserve. A sad day.

This is great news, Pat Patterson is Switching on the Lightbulb. How many engineers does it take to switch a LAMP? Indeed, Two dot o. Identity 2.0!

Now this Two dot Oohh thing /is/ out of control but is more then a media hype trademark of Tim TM. And part of this 2.0 thingy is Identity 2.0. More then single sign on / log on, it's about who you are! Not just how you authenticate against what service with what protocol. Some very very good presentations can be found at Dick Hardt's site.

Having said that ID2.0 is more then a protocol or a password, you do need those to "be" yourself. SAML is one of the popular corporate ways of doing this. SAML however has been J2EE only for a long time, not in theory but in practice. And that doesnt help the federated part in federated identity management.

Now with Pat's work, SAML 2.0 can be used from PHP:

Over the past few months I've had a side project - implementing a SAML 2.0 service provider (SP) in PHP

Great to see this, in combination with SUN open "Sun Access Manager" offering, OpenSSO federated identity management can be used from PHP projects like Drupal as well with SAML. Great! Thanks SuperPat!
Switching on the Lightbulb